


The Anatomy Of Man (And Similar Creatures)

by Bee_activist



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: M/M, This is like literally the most loosely metal gear based thing i've ever written sorry, This is my weird as all hell...semi-Wiccanish supernatural AU hahaha, guys being dudes, sorry if your name is Roy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 17:58:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18504157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bee_activist/pseuds/Bee_activist
Summary: Things were changing for David. They're changing all the time.





	The Anatomy Of Man (And Similar Creatures)

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry this is so drawn out and long-winded I just love David so much, but unfortunately, I can't write about David if he's not in love with Hal but I did this in a weird way. Thank you for giving this a read, have some guy time w me.

            He thought maybe he was being haunted. He would often fall into his bed, overcome with exhaustion and be completely unable to sleep. This was one of those nights. Every night, it seemed. He sat up and dragged calloused hands over his face before walking to the kitchen. Ugly and modest with too few utensils despite the fact that he lived alone and only had enough money for soup every night, the times he did eat dinner, yet he only owned forks. Spoons weren’t even expensive, metal wasn’t a necessity, though for his sake he pretended it was a matter of pride why he hadn’t just bought a box of plastic spoons in eight months.

            He would think about spoons when he ate clumpy soup with a fork or even when he just didn’t eat at all. They were on his mind when he walked to the supermarket and when he walked back but somehow never when he actually did his shopping. He knew why he didn’t have any. It was healthier to obsess over spoons rather than other things. He was healthy, he was practically an Olympian for mulling over how his cream of mushroom would be so much easier to eat with the right utensil rather than how badly he needed to smoke or drink until he couldn’t think at all. This was good for him, he knew that.

            Though now it was one-thirty am, and he had already had soup at seven before he went to lay restlessly awake at eight. He no longer knew what kept him up anymore. It was easier when he was younger, he always had an answer for everything, and he knew that after a while he could fix it; it would pass. When he was twenty-six and bolted out of bed screaming or when he collapsed after his nephew set off a firework at the park, he knew it was the war. He knew that. He could deal with it. He would sweat, and if it were really bad, like the firework, maybe he’d cry and scratch his arms till they bled; then he’d move on. That would never go away, and sometimes it was the reason he would sit at the wobbly coffee table until the dawn hurt his tired eyes. It wasn’t easy, but it was familiar.

            He no longer knew what plagued him, what the poignant fear was that tucked itself under the sheets and beside him when he laid awake. He figured he was probably depressed, he hadn’t bought a fucking spoon in eight months. He wanted to leave this place as much as he wanted a home. He wanted to be dead as much as he wanted to live. It was an incurable malady, it was what it was. He grimaced at the words of his father that echoed in his mind and finally got up from the table and started to get dressed when he found himself to be agreeing with John, of all the bastards he could ever sympathize with he didn’t want it to be his father. He hesitated before walking out the door and looked behind him. Everything was the same, it always was. The blinds were broken and white, the wall was off-white, the carpet was a yellowish white - all of these things following an as always pattern. He felt scared, a deep-rooted fear that set up a folding chair between his lungs. It was the war, he decided, it was always the war.

 

            “David! You’re early!” Roy was an unimpressive man. He was short and round in the middle, which was fine, especially for his age. David caught himself thinking about it often that if he ate as regularly as a thirty-four-year-old man probably should, he would be double the size of Roy. David had always put on weight easily. Roy had been married three times, and in David’s fourth month of work at the library, he often remarked that he and his new girlfriend were getting pretty serious. They had become “exclusive” the month before. Roy was a good man, that much was certain to David. He always addressed him by his name, by David. It was nice, some nights he almost forgot what it was.

            Roy had given him a job at the library despite the fact that David only had two jobs of prior experience and one of them was war, and the other was at a Milkshake Shack. When David had applied, Roy had simply quirked that he didn’t seem like the “library type.” David still didn’t know what that meant, and sometimes found himself thinking about it when he had run out of things to think about which, admittedly, was not many. David figured it was probably because he was a man, though that collapsed part of Roy’s argument as Roy was a man himself.

            Maybe it was because he was a military man, not terribly eloquent, David preferred not to speak when he didn’t have too. He liked to read, he’d written a poem in high school once for a girl and then they’d dated for a month or two. He used literature for more practical purposes. That didn’t make him any less of a librarian, really, but he realized that Roy’s statement was probably just to form a hesitant conversation during their first meeting, but David had taken nearly fourth months to pick up on the social cue. He and Roy were friends now, he decided. Acquaintances, more like. They talked during work sometimes, and it wasn’t unbearable. David could live with that, he even enjoyed it.

            “He walks as men do.”

            “What?” David asked, absentmindedly. He didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, he figured it was a new book order that had come with the libraries subscription with some publishing company. Roy had been excited about it, something big, he’d always say. Something in New York.

            “Dave, I caught her in bed with someone else last night.” David hummed and looked up from his game of online chess back to Roy to give him his full attention. David didn’t know what the situation was, but he mustered his best sympathetic face.

            “Is that what you just were saying? What? Caught who in bed with someone else?”

            “Jesus Dave. This is all I’ve been talking about! Have you even been listening? Rachel, I caught Rachel in bed with,” Roy lowered his voice to a whisper. “Someone else.” David blinked. He really was trying to understand what Roy was getting at but he failed almost every time Roy tried to be vague or cryptic while conveying a clear meaning. Roy was big on reading in-between the lines, he almost never actually said how he felt. Though he’d be sure to throw nasty glances around and mutter to himself to let David know he was upset, or bring him extra coffee, slightly too sweet to let him know he was happy. But Roy never actually just told David the reason for anything. David didn’t understand him. He didn’t understand this town. He didn’t understand anything, not even online chess.

            “Who? Who was it?”

            “It wasn’t another...man...let’s say,” Roy stressed, he was perspiring.

            “Was it Linda from the gas station?” It was a small town.

            “How did yo- No! No, I didn’t get her name. It was probably one of those seductrices from L.A. or something, you know, those weird women from the underground. Geez, isn’t it just awful?”

            David really did like Roy. He tried to relate to Rachel. Chained to a shit town and an unimpressive man with a heart of gold that pays alimony to three different women. Linda had secrets everybody knew, just like David, and he respected her for that, he understood her for that. They were all just people. Just people.

            “Yeah, it’s terrible.” David looked back to the chess game. He had lost in a stalemate.

 

            “He walks as men do.”

            “What?” David felt that panic feeling rising in his throat. He thought he might vomit. He might projectile vomit all over this tired looking woman staring intently at the twenty in his hand. David looked at the weary women and realized that she was thinking what everyone in the town thinks when he comes their way, they all are thinking about the incident. Even when it happened seven months ago. He can tell because of the way they stare, scared he might use his baby killer tactics on their poor Christian pacifistic population just as how they’d heard in the news.

            “Eighteen dollars.” The woman said again. She was irritated. David stuck the twenty to the counter and walked to the exit. He felt as though someone was watching him. He could feel the Arabian sun prickling his skin, and he looked around one last time before shouldering the door open. He looked at Linda, as she was getting out of her car from across the parking lot. She was the town widowed lesbian and ex-military. She had served as a nurse in Vietnam. They understood each other, to an extent. Simply because no one else could. She nodded to him. He inclined his head, not yet a nod, and jogged back to his apartment.

            David slowed as he approached the champagne colored building. Overgrowth broke into some of the window’s on the bottom, leaves littering the cracked cement and shared garages. The grass was luscious, revived of it’s near permanent yellow cracking nature, shriveling in neat piles beside the two-floor building. It was more of a motel than anything, David looked at it now the same he did eight months ago, it is what it is.

            He didn’t know what he felt now. Across the entirety of the building were the words, He walks as men do. The words were joyous, almost childlike, written in mud and dried with dirt. David dropped the brown bag and heard the pears explode as they collided with the ground and felt the cottage cheese spray onto the bottom of his jeans. A soup can, split pea and ham, rolled along the edge of the curb, creating a long metallic ring before the sound suddenly ceased and a light parry of footsteps followed in its wake.

            “David.” The voice was light. As light as he remembered it. David would’ve dropped his groceries at the sound of that voice again, but he had already done that, so he had no choice but to turn around and let his arms lay limply at his sides.

            The eyes were intense. He remembered that, too. More intense than anything he had ever seen. He remembered that the man, god, thing, it had the face of a stag. The head of a stag, with towering antlers that were the width of one of David’s arms on either side of its head. The stag looked at him. It wore a light black suit, slightly too short in the trousers. A white tie hung loosely from their neck, faded, and David wondered if the deity washed its own clothes, or if it even knew how too. It held the soup in both its hands, clutching it somewhat protectively to the chest of its faded suit.

            “Do you feel like I’m haunting you? That wasn’t my intention. You’ve been on my mind.”

            David simply stared. He’d never been good at talking to people. Sometimes Roy would say the same thing to him, or even Linda, once. Roy had given him a small deck of cards, saying that his dad had been in the military and always told “Little Roy” stories about waiting out the gunfire over a game of cards. David didn’t know anything about cards, they didn’t play games in his division, but he said that he did and that he and Roy’s dad should play a game sometime. It was misguided, but David had appreciated the sentiment. Roy said that David had been on his mind. He’d thought about it for a week. David had always thought of himself as a drifter, forgettable, a ghost. He was a ghost terrified of being haunted.

            “Why are you talking to me. Why are you here.” David said it more like a statement. He felt angry. The Stag blinked, and David marveled in the fact that the deity seemed unsure, caught off guard.

            “I was thinking about you.” The Stag reaffirmed.

            “Why? It’s been eight years.” The Stag blinked once more, long and steady.

            “Has it? You must forgive me. Time doesn’t pass for me the way it does for you David. Eight years has only been a couple days for me.”

            “Good for you.” They both shuffled. Somewhat awkwardly. David had been rude, and he hadn’t meant too at the same time that he had. He never could make up his mind. It was a stalemate. He had spoken with a slightly passive aggressive tone to a God, he didn’t know if there were rules about that. The Stag opened its mouth and breathed, as though it might break the silence but then closed its mouth again. David sighed. “Do you want to come in, or something?” He gestured vaguely towards the Stag’s chest. “I was going to make some...soup.” The Stag’s eyes brightened slightly. It nodded.

 

            “He walks as men do. So, what, that’s about you?” David looked from where he leaned against the oven to the Stag seated at the coffee table. It looked uncomfortable, out of place.

            “I suppose.”

            “You suppose?”

            “Yes, I did not know that I would be given a permanent physical body after my death leading the wild hunt. The Summerland empathized with me, for all the good souls I have brought it. So it gave me a body of my own.” David hummed and nodded, pretending to understand the heaps of mystical bullshit that seemed to fly from the Stag’s mouth and splatter in his face. He assumed the Stag was aware that David knew nothing of what was occurring, though the Stag didn’t seem like the pushy type.

            “So when you spoke to me in the war -”

            “I spoke to you in a dream.” The Stag cut him off. “You had passed out, but it was too chaotic for any of your fellow soldiers to notice. Before, this happened, I could only contact humans within their dreams. I have been in your dreams almost every night for the past eight years, I suppose, however long it’s been for you and hasn’t been for me. That’s why you haven’t been able to sleep lately. I cannot exist in dreams anymore.”

            “Why did you come to my dream?” David was curious. He watched people die in war. He felt anger, and he felt relief.

            “I don’t know. You fascinated me, for some reason, I think. I don’t know. If I hadn’t visited you, you’d still be asleep out there. Buried by sand and the Arabian sun.” David felt like he had to test the limit. Anamorphic stag or not, he thought, the thing seemed to be a bit of a dick.

            “What? Am I supposed to thank you? What about all of the other people who are dead out there? Why am I here?”

            “You didn’t want to die out there, I know, I could hear your thoughts.” The Stag sounded almost defensive. “Why do you want to die here more than you did in the war?” David didn’t want to hear that. He didn’t have any spoons for that question. He had tried to not make any friends for that question. The Stag’s eyes widened, impassively, and it leaned back in the chair. They both stared at anything but each other in the silence. The Stag coughed into its hand, David didn’t know anything about animals, anything at all, but it was so incredibly unnatural enough that it reminded him this thing was not human. Despite what the words on his building might say.

            “Are you God?” He asked. Might as well get it out of the way. The Stag leaned its head on its human arms that rested on the table.

            “No,” The Stag said, firmly. “At least not in the way that you and this town associate that word. But I am not as you are, or I wasn’t, once. I ease the process of life and death, of birth and decay. I’m afraid a human mind cannot quite grasp the concept, not because you are dumb, that’s not what I’m saying to you. You just speak in a different language, the things I do cannot be said by the Human tongue. I am nothing and everything. I am an idea, at the root. I live through manifestation. Though now, as you can see, I walk as men do.”

            David clicked his tongue. “Huh.”

            “Sorry.” The Stag almost seemed sheepish. It was a strange emotion to see on an animal face.

            “No, no, I mean, it’s fine. It’s okay. What...do you have a name?” It was a good place to start.

            “You cannot say my name. A different language you cannot speak. You could just call me something, like, Roy.”

            “Roy?” David sputtered. “Oh my god. No, really. I can’t do that. I know someone named Roy I just...” He trailed off and studied the Stag. It seemed to almost be smiling. It was strange to look at, though not unpleasant. “Do you always look like that then? There’s nothing wrong with it or anything it just seems weird that the summer palace or whatever would make you man but keep you looking like a stag.” The Stag blinked, a trait David had noticed. A tick.

            “The Summerland made me man once more. I actually have the same body that I lost a long time ago. When I was a human killed by the hunt before they made me something else. That is how most of us come to be. By accident. I didn’t realize I still had my dream self partially intact. I’m not used to being, somewhat, man again.”

            The Staghead disappeared to reveal the face of a completely ordinary man. He looked almost European. Skinny, almost college-esque, he looked like he should have glasses. He had longish hair and a long nose and distinctly feminine features, he was attractive while also being plain, just above ordinary. David felt stunned. He set two bowls of soup in front of them and sat across from the man at the table, self consciously laying a fork across his bowl. The man looked at him, amused and slightly concerned, but with some struggle ate the soup with his given fork. The man’s eyes were a bright blue, like the sky, or something. David thought they suited him. That he might be a person he would’ve liked to know before all of that weird religious stuff happened. The man smiled at him. Perhaps he could get to know him now.

            “Do you remember what your name used to be?” David asked. The man didn’t quite look somber, but contemplative.

            “I think it started with an H.” He said, slowly.

            “How about Hal?” David said. It suited him, it really suited him. David saw his eyes light up, in the very pretty way they seemed too.

            “It’s very nice. Dare I say, better than Roy. In many cultures, it is a very powerful thing to do, to give someone a name. In this way, you don’t have to feel weird about the whole deity thing. You’ve given me a name.” David smiled. He had kind of forgotten about the whole deity thing. Two bowls were left in the sink, and David and Hal played three games of chess that David lost every time. He argued that he didn’t have centuries of experience under his belt and Hal retaliated that chess wasn’t a “thing” in the Summerland. David fell asleep on the ground, leaning against the eggshell couch halfway through losing a fourth game. He slept.

            David awoke to a creak on the floorboard. The sound made from someone exploring the apartment who didn’t properly know which every other flax floorboard creaked terribly from the years of termite damage. A faded white tie hung across the back of the sofa, and David’s eyes focused on the chessboard. His king was in check, he would have to move to get out of it. He would have to change, have to do something to save himself. There were two metal spoons, glistening at him from the coffee table.

            David shook the chessboard, and let the pieces scatter to the ground.


End file.
